Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

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More joys of feminism?

This story is a couple of months old, and I wish I knew how it ended. A couple of street preachers named Robert Parker and Don Karns (if you google a bit you'll find that they go around the world doing this) were preaching in a New Jersey train station in late June when they were approached by a couple of hostile police officers. One of them, Kathleen Shanahan, was definitely female, and the other was named "Sandy," so I'm just guessing that that was a woman as well.

It seems that for several years Parker and Karns have been unknowingly breaking a rule that says that you have to have a special permit and stand in a special zone in order to preach, leaflet, or engage in other types of advocacy speech to passersby in the New Jersey transit system. This rule has never been enforced on them before, and I infer that no one has told them about it before.

Eventually, after the street preachers filmed the police (which angered the police, even though the preachers stopped recording upon request), after Parker asked, "What law am I breaking?" and after Karns refused to provide ID, the two street preachers were arrested and charged with defiant trespass and two counts of obstruction for recording with a cell phone and declining to provide identification. Their court date was set for July 10, but I haven't been able to find out what happened.

I'll try to force myself to assume for the sake of the argument that Officers Kathleen and Sandy are just ardent sticklers for the rules, that the hostility had nothing to do with the religious nature of the speech, and that they would have enforced these rules on anyone they happened to come upon in the station, including members of PETA or the Occupy movement. In this, they appear to be different from a fellow officer who wished Parker and Karns a nice day two weeks previously. Still, Officer Kathleen and Officer Sandy could, as far as I can tell, have informed Parker and Karns of the rule in a friendly manner and told them how they could go about obtaining the needed permit. They could have then asked them to move along for the nonce, accompanying the request with a friendly, "Have a nice day." At that point, if Parker and Karns had refused to move along, there might (if the representation of the rule is correct) have been grounds for taking sterner measures.

But it doesn't sound like that was how it went. For one thing, Kathy and Sandy were really ticked off by the fact that Karns wouldn't show them ID. But even more, Kathy got the vapors over the fact that a) Parker had a backpack and b) the two men were trying to film them with a cell phone. She found this positively terrifying, threatening behavior and felt the need to express her fear:

Parker and Karns attempted to record the encounter with their cell phones, but were ordered to turn them off, which they did.

“[Sergeant Shanahan] started repeatedly saying, ‘Put the phone down; put the phone down,’” Karns recounted. “You guys are big guys, and I’m just a little officer. You know how scary it is when you have a camera in your hand. How do I know you’re not terrorists? I have no way of knowing that’s not a bomb.”

Karns said that Shanahan explained that she had just been to a class last week which showed cell phones being used as weapons, and informed the men that it was against the law for them to film her. She later told Parker that she also had concerns about his backpack, which was searched for train tickets after it was confiscated by police.

Don't get me wrong. Male police officers can behave very badly as well. (All the officers involved in the arrests of Christians in Dearborn, which I've discussed at length, were male.) But I imagine I won't be the only one who is moved to a mixture of disgust and amusement at Officer Kathy's childish and exaggeratedly feminine approach to police work. What, exactly, was her goal in saying these things to Parker and Karns? If they really were Christianist terrorists (which evidently she thought plausible), would they be moved to pity by her "little ol' me" speech? If they were just what they appeared to be--street preachers who didn't know they needed a permit--why slander them by implying that they are a threat? Why, in that case, even feel threatened by their filming the encounter?

Officer Kathy is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. She's not bold enough to deal with potential terrorists without whining about how she's "just a little officer" and how "scary" their behavior is. And she's not sensible enough to treat harmless citizens in a civilized manner. I can just imagine how useful it would be if Abdul were about to blow up Officer Kathy for her to tell him how "scary" his cell phone is. Yeah, that'll work. Keep it up, Kathy. You're making the citizens of New Jersey a lot safer.

Meanwhile, just to show that all those stereotypes about vindictiveness are incorrect...

As they were separated, Parker states that he overheard the officers disagreeing over which cell to place him in.

“There’s a pervert in there; we’ll put him in that one,” he heard Shanahan say.

Comments (38)

The more I think of it, the more odd that little "Do you know how scary it is," "I'm just a little officer" speech seems. One tries to imagine any scenario, any scenario at all, in which it would fit, and none comes to mind.

It almost seems like a "let's pretend" speech addressed to kindergarteners that treats cops as objects of multicultural solicitude. "Okay, children, try to enter into the mindset of a police officer, who, you must remember, comes from a very different culture. Now, you think of yourself as just a normal, harmless person, but to that little officer, you're a big, scary man. And your phone is very scary. Remember, that little officer has recently been to a seminar in which she learned that a phone could be a bomb. So you are going to seem threatening if you point a phone at her. Remember, children, how we teach you not to point guns? Well, now it's time to teach you this: Never point a phone at a police officer. It's frightening because it looks like a bomb. You don't want to frighten the officer. It's important to see things from other people's point of view."

One of my favorite news shows (before it was canceled) was Judge Andrew Napolitano's "Freedom Watch". He was constantly reporting on police officers who would arrest people for filming them - even confiscating cameras and phones and deleting the videos. It's an unsettling trend amongst law enforcement - male and female. I'd never heard the justification that a phone could be a 'bomb' before though!

There's a discussion of that kind of thing in the now rather old book _Feminism and Freedom_ by libertarian philosopher Michael Levin. He talks about how away back decades ago the judges started ordering police and fire depts. not to use height and weight measures in such a way as to exclude women. I haven't re-read the sections in a while, but IIRC they _were_ allowed to apply them to the men if they wanted to exclude short or puny men but in that case had to have a different standard for the women. However, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them have just thrown out the height-weight measures altogether so as to be fair to the short men. And I suppose some judges might have required that as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of them have just thrown out the height-weight measures altogether so as to be fair to the short men.

More than likely they were not thrown out to "be fair" to men - but rather to avoid lawsuits. Everything corporate these days, especially "diversity" and "green" related, is based on an avoidance of litigation. I'd assume that many government departments are run the same way.

Whether it wd. generate lawsuits wd. depend on the court precedents in an individual state and federally. If, as I think was originally the case, the court precedents permitted the use of the physical requirements for men (in other words, a blatant double standard), then the short men wouldn't get very far in court.

Well, it ain't good for effective police work. But then, effective police work ain't a business, so there is no reward system set up here to punish the police department for hiring and keeping Officer Kathy, only a system for punishing the department if it tries to get rid of her. I have no idea how one would try to translate the effectiveness of a police department into a business model, nor do I intend to try, because it would probably be a bad model. But we definitely have a case here of incentivizing hiring and firing behavior that undermine the purposes for which the force allegedly operates and for which the people, who pay for it through taxes, need it to operate. Which purposes don't include arresting harmless street preachers while whimpering at them (or lecturing them) about how scary they are.

I may not sit on a corporate board but I work for one of the largest corporations in America and I see firsthand the way management decisions (especially hiring, firing, promotion, demotion and discipline of personnel) are made based on (according to many managers I've spoken with) an all-encompassing fear of litigation. In this case - a police department that may have relaxed its hiring standards to include "little women" (and in which no profit margins are at stake) - that is certainly applicable.

There's also the need to present a good public image to the community. Police departments hiring more women and minorities, (and welcoming Muslims to the community for that matter) are all about public image. Lawsuits are bad for public image and a good legal team will warn managers about potential lawsuits that may result from certain actions.

Good thing nobody claimed that they were. But actually, you are wrong about that too. You are pretty much wrong about just about everything you post on the practice of business. Lawsuits are one method of maintaining competitive advantage. I can't say whether they are or are not a zero sum game though.

PC tyranny, on the other hand, is definitely not a zero sum game, and it isn't all about lawsuits as you claimed. It in fact increases the actual value of large businesses, creating real economic value in the form of liquidity, as I explained in the linked post.

Libertarians are always going on and on about things they haven't got the first clue about. Anyone who has lived how the sausage is actually made knows better.

Isn't it a good thing, then, that setting up a good police department, an actually, objectively, _good_ police department that protects the innocent, enforces just and reasonable laws, and captures and stops the wicked, isn't some kind of business game? Because then we don't need to talk about competitive advantage and liquidity, and we can start noting obvious things about the direct impact of the forcible admission of women into the police force on the *quality of the work* without being told that, hey, the actual quality of the work is rendered more and more irrelevant by all the rest of this stuff concerning the alleged value of "diversity," liquidity, and the value of lawsuits to doing down your competitor, etc., etc. We can just think about the quality of the sausages.

Although some corporations shoot for a broadcast look - a portion of the corporate image looking like some of each and every segment of America - other corporations shoot for a plain vanilla version that looks 80% alike to 80% of America. Both models can "work" in the sense of being profitable. Toe-ing the line with PC doesn't have to be lockstep and complete in order to successful in corporate practice. For example, Target makes a big deal out of being gay friendly. But that loses them my business (and others like me), and all in all only about 5% of America holds that value closely and dearly. Walmart, alternatively, is quiet and silent about gay culture, and so they are not offensive in that regard to at least 70% of America, and their silence is not taken as directly offensive to the 30% who claim that they might care some of the time.

Tony, Zippy has a different set of ideas about why being PC is profitable for the bottom line. Not necessarily related to the considerations you're discussing. I don't endorse his ideas, but I've debated them with him enough to prefer not to do so again. In any event, as I said above, the thing about police departments, fire, etc., is that we don't have to apply a "bottom line" analysis that brings in a lot of subjective and confounding factors in order to see quite clearly that the mad rush to diversity, particularly w.r.t. women, has been bad for the work selbst, which is what should matter the most in these areas.

The inestimable economist John Lott has looked at the actual data. (And I'll give you the citation! John R. Lott Jr., "Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime," Economic Inquiry, April 1, 2000.)

It turns out that, far from "de-escalating force" through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. (Especially when perps won't reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.)

Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott's analysis, each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent.

Adding males to a police force decreases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police. Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. By contrast, adding white female officers increases accidental shootings. (And for my Handgun Control Inc. readers: Private citizens are much less likely to accidentally shoot someone than are the police, presumably because they do not have to approach the suspect and make an arrest.)

In addition to accidentally shooting people, female law enforcement officers are also more likely to be assaulted than male officers -- as the whole country saw in Atlanta last week. Lott says: "Increasing the number of female officers by 1 percentage point appears to increase the number of assaults on police by 15 percent to 19 percent."

In addition to the obvious explanations for why female cops are more likely to be assaulted and to accidentally shoot people -- such as that our society encourages girls to play with dolls -- there is also the fact that women are smaller and weaker than men.

Btw, on that bit about being "more likely to be assaulted," have you ever noticed how when a female officer stops a car and gets laid out flat by the drug dealer (or whatever bad guy he might be) in the car, she's a hero? There's never any question of thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if that would have happened to a male officer? Is it perhaps more likely that the guy in the car decided to attack the person pulling him over because she was a woman?"

have you ever noticed how when a female officer stops a car and gets laid out flat by the drug dealer (or whatever bad guy he might be) in the car, she's a hero?

Have you ever noticed how any time a woman does something that men do every day as part of the work, but which is unusual for women, many fall all over themselves gushing about how great she is? It often smacks of "why look at what Fido learned how to do!"

I was talking about individuals suing businesses over discrimination - not corporations suing each other. There is no advantage in people suing your business for anything that can be spun as "racism", "homophobia" or "gender discrimination".

I was talking about individuals suing businesses over discrimination - not corporations suing each other. There is no advantage in people suing [businesses] for anything that can be spun as "racism", "homophobia" or "gender discrimination".

Yes, there is. Use your imagination. Companies operate in product, labor, and financial markets. If you literally can't imagine ways to use employment laws and lawsuits for competitive advantage, you are unqualified to run a large company.

Yes, there is. Use your imagination. Companies operate in product, labor, and financial markets. If you literally can't imagine ways to use employment laws and lawsuits for competitive advantage, you are unqualified to run a large company.

We can use our imaginations all we want, but there is a difference between attempting to gain competitive advantage at the margins for whatever gain can be had from that and what sustains modern business in the long term, which is doing what it does best and/or finding out how its core competencies can be leveraged to do something better than others. Those who aren't able to do the latter well are not likely sustainable businesses in the long-term. In the good old days --not yet fully past-- when large businesses were shuffling money between the pillars of the "iron triangle" of big gov/labor/business it took one thing to prosper, and now it takes something real. Patent law looms large of course, and ever more so, but the latter phenomenon only reinforces the point that the old rules of lever-pulling the system aren't as important as producing a good product or service that people wish to pay for.

And the entity that is tilting the playing field via laws for competitive advantage by far the most effectively with the law is our own federal government, and no lawyers or laws will save any business from that. Just ask Arthur Anderson. A top five accounting firm with a good reputation and 80.000+ employees in 2002, to roughly 200 a few short years later after government lawsuits.

...and now it takes something real. Patent law looms large of course, and ever more so, but the latter phenomenon only reinforces the point that the old rules of lever-pulling the system aren't as important as producing a good product or service that people wish to pay for.

And the entity that is tilting the playing field via laws for competitive advantage by far the most effectively with the law is our own federal government, and no lawyers or laws will save any business from that. Just ask Arthur Anderson.

I think you just proved Zippy's argument without realizing it. The federal government is the enabler of all of this political correctness nonsense. Were there no standing for hostile work environments, discrimination, etc. all enforceable by Uncle Sam, there would be no competitive advantage in using PC rules against competitors.

A top five accounting firm with a good reputation and 80.000+ employees in 2002, to roughly 200 a few short years later after government lawsuits.

That's what happens when you break the law in a severe way. SAIC lost money in Q1 because they defrauded NYC and the federal government nailed them to the tune of $450m in restitution owed NYC. Between that and the sequestration that will go into effect if no budget is passed, thousands of SAIC employees will likely lose their jobs directly due to government action. Like Arthur Anderson, they'll also have had it coming as a company.

Sigh, I realize y'all are bored around here. If I promise to write another post soon, can we stop this particular debate on this particular thread? I was busy living yesterday instead... This really doesn't relate to _police departments_, and I also think Zippy is saying something more than just that PC laws create a legal environment in which the companies that follow them have an advantage over their competitors. That's trivially true, and whatever else Zippy's point may be, it isn't trivial.

Now, I'm doing my best to be tactful, but I guess I'm going to have to come right out and say this: Years ago Zippy and I hashed over some of this concerning what he is saying here, and I remain unconvinced. However, I much prefer not to debate it with him again. Moreover, it fortunately doesn't apply to police work, for the reasons I've given a couple of times already.

I think you just proved Zippy's argument without realizing it. The federal government is the enabler of all of this political correctness nonsense.

Earth to Mike: My objection is how he's implying that one needs some quite bizarre understandings of the business world to be qualified for management in a large business. Zippy has never quoted anyone other than himself, nor given examples to illustrate the vague generalities he's offering. But the idea that a more complex legal and regulatory regime favors larger businesses isn't controversial --of course it does-- nor is the idea that the feds are the main cause of that environment controversial --of course it is.

That's what happens when you break the law in a severe way.

You assume they broke the law because the government sued them. Mike, if this is as deep as your legal skepticism runs then it's just a pose. If you're going to throw in with everyone else who thinks that since people lost money some law must have been broken and someone has to be sacrificed then your position is more of a pose. A large company was destroyed by the feds and you assume the feds were in the right without any specific knowledge of the case.

Police departments do get sued, and the fear of lawsuits may indeed be a major factor in relaxing hiring standards for officers. I apologize for bringing "business" into this - that part of my argument was unnecessary and ultimately led to this tangent. I did not foresee that happening, nor was it my intention.

You assume they broke the law because the government sued them. Mike, if this is as deep as your legal skepticism runs then it's just a pose. If you're going to throw in with everyone else who thinks that since people lost money some law must have been broken and someone has to be sacrificed then your position is more of a pose. A large company was destroyed by the feds and you assume the feds were in the right without any specific knowledge of the case.

It would be a mistake to conflate my lack of interest in digging into the details of a particular case with my general approach to things.

Zippy is right, the libertarians are wrong. That's because Zippy is actually attempting to play the game while the rest are just memorizing the manual or laboring at an externality.

'Working for a corporation' is not competition in the same sense as 'running a corporation'. When working for one, you're generally only competing for your job against others, and following the rules set down by the corporation will generally benefit you. While running one, you're operating under the murky and randomly enforced web of actual federal law, enforced federal law, corrupt federal officials, and shameless/ignorant/politically favored competitors. The higher you go, the less freedom to operate as anything other than a figurehead you have, thanks to federal law, state law, local law, opportunistic lawyers, opportunistic plaintiffs, wayward women with tongues looser than their morals, immigrants who see you as an imperialistic pig-dog meatsack that produces money for their family when bullied instead of a fellow citizen, opportunistic Aspiring Basketball Players willing to engage in consequence-free shakedowns whenever they feel like it, and the various well-meaning yet ultimately destructive female Conflict Smashers determined to seep any physical or objective evidence of stife under the rug.

One cannot become good at maneuvering in this environment without being either drained of personality or personally buttressed by a community that officially or unofficially provides the social and legal backbone of sanity to come home to(Hello Mitt Romney!) Wouldn't recommend it to those with options, though those who take that path typically aren't doing it for themselves, and will screw their anonymous fellow man for the sake of their own family every chance they get.

(Yes this is a deliberate parallel from the last Not A Gaming thread.)

Max, you almost make me want to see Norma Rae again. Look, I don't know what type of business zippy is engaged in, but it is quite distorting to generalize from the pharmaceutical industry to any other business. To expect the pharma industry to even roughly correspond to reality isn't very . . . well, realistic. Even a historical review of what they're trying to treat with many of these drugs would tell us that. Science and social science are worlds apart. Aside from antibiotics and painkillers most of the rest are actually ineffective at what they claim to treat. And then there is the large taxpayer-funded decades-long expeditions to find such things as the genetic link to alcoholism (spawned by the gift of the AMA declaring it so in the 70s), which hasn't been done but they keep pleading "please send more money we're getting real close now". Finding anything isn't the point, but rather the point is funding more researchers.

So Zippy is dead-on about pharma, but the relevance for any other company at this point in time is highly dubious, except as a marker of what is passing away. Those who have made their competitiveness and profit by high-level deals with middle-men are in decline (from slight to spectacular) and those who appeal directly to the consumer are in the ascendent. Many are in denial about this and think how things have been since WWII is the way they will always be. The "consumerization of IT" (Information Technology) is quite real, and I find it exciting. My boss used to set the limits on what I could do for clients, and now my clients set those limits directly and I inform my boss of how serving them is going. I prefer the latter. Their judgement is better, because I would want to do the same things if I were them. Looking back this trend has been a very long-term thing, and what we're seeing now is just the culmination of years of less obvious parts to the phenomenon.

But look, I chose my trade because I thought it would give me a lot of independence, and I'm happy with the decision. I know my father made a similar choice for the same reasons I did. But the idea that we can generalize about the conditions experienced by some average "corporate worker" is pretty dumb. Even when I worked for a Fortune 500 company I knew they hired me for my outlook and skills in small business, and I've never felt like the generalities tossed about applied to me, and with each passing year I feel like that business is evolving to come towards my way of thinking, rather than forcing me to it. I cannot relate in any way to these vague and generalized diatribes about big business or the corporate drones that supposedly inhabit them like bugs in amber.